WHITE-KNUCKLE ZEN: Mellow Maui

Mellow Maui

        Most of the waitresses at Maui's Hyatt Regency Pavilion restaurant couldn't see me, the new waiter; I was invisible to them. Mavis, the lovely hostess, could see me, but Kevin told me not to get too close to her, because she was local. Kevin was a handsome local waiter who talked like a haole, from doing a long stint in the military. He took it upon himself to be my advisor. But he couldn't help me with women, because he couldn't get any women, either.
        My problem at work was that I was too philosophical. I was always thinking about nuclear weapons and toxic waste, while my coworkers thought about sports cars, cocaine, surfing the waves on the north shore, and sex. When I'd pick up an order from the cooks, I might ask them: "Do you think there will always be war?" While passing a busy waitress, I might drop the question: "Is it right to let people in poor countries starve to death to stabilize the world's population?" I would ask my manager: "Is enlightenment possible for everyone?"
        Sometimes, in a lighter vein, I'd ask all the waiters, waitresses, cooks, and the hostess to decide which character on Gilligan's Island they were. Everybody started calling me "Cosmo" because they thought I was spaced out and because I talked about cosmic things. Reagan had just been elected for the first time, and I thought I was living in some kind of dream world. How could people not be amazed and troubled? What was more strange was that out of the army of young, attractive, fairly-well-educated waiters and waitresses at the Hyatt, only a few had voted, and then, for Reagan. I was reading Crime and Punishment, while my colleagues were reading High Times and Surfer magazine.
        Finally, out of pity, a shallow but attractive young waitress asked me to a party at her house. I went, very self-conscious about how I dressed. The casual Maui look is not an easy look to achieve. One must not, by any means, cross over the line of looking like a tourist. I didn't fit in at all. Most of the people knew one another well. I was among the few who were clearly not welcome to go upstairs when the cocaine was being served.
        There was one woman at the Hyatt who did find me interesting. Lucretia was the most desirable of all the waitresses. She was statuesque yet lithe as a cat. Her hair was wild and reddish-blond, her complexion flushed and healthy. The keen features of her face radiated confidence and beauty. Her orange cotton Aloha uniform dress seemed to have been thrown over her goddess body as an afterthought. You could see her beating boys at baseball or having sex with a billionaire.
        She could wait on ten tables without writing anything down, and she charmed the tourists by talking like a local—"You like more da kine?" (Would you like me to refill your coffee?)—even though she was a white girl who'd spent most of her life in an affluent neighborhood in Santa Cruz, California. She loved philosophy. And she loved having a man at work who would talk to her. I was the only waiter stupid enough to talk to her.
        Her boyfriend was a pure-blooded Hawaiian, Nathan, the best surfer on the island. His father had prospered by selling a small tract of beach-front property to Canadian developers, but Nathan hated the haoles taking over the island. Lucretia joked to me that Nathan's goal in life was to get a machine gun and kill a bunch of white people. He never worked, except to water his marijuana plants. He drove around Lahaina in an immaculate yellow Jeep with a picture of a demonic green dragon on the back of it. He never wore a shirt. His skin was very dark, and his muscles glistened.
        He beat Lucretia from time to time, she confided to me, and wouldn't allow her to have any male friends. How was that supposed to make me feel? I must be such a wimp that I don't count. Or else Lucretia and I are conspirators having an intellectual tryst behind Nathan's back. Nathan was a non-philosopher. He ate philosophers for lunch.
        I'd only been on Maui for a few months. I moved there on a whim in the days when I was a young man traveling around and working odd jobs. I had been working graveyard shift as a clerk at a depressing motel in L.A. and didn't really have anything going on when my uncle called me from Lahaina and told me what an idyllic life he had there. Uncle Glenn, my stepfather Leroy's brother, said he had a taxi he'd let me drive. The only thing I knew about Hawaii was that stupid music and tiki necklaces came from there and that the Japanese bombed it once. I had gotten stoned and missed most of high school, and the few junior college literature courses I'd taken had left me pretty ignorant about geography. Until my plane got close enough to actually see Maui, I had thought it was a little island that you could walk across in about five minutes.
        Taxi business was slow, so I got a job as a busboy at the new Hyatt Regency Hotel. They spent millions of dollars building that place. There were 1,000-year-old Buddha statues everywhere and live peacocks walking around or running from tourists with cameras. A beautiful beach had been created from sand and palm trees brought in from another island, and there were water slides and three swimming pools right on the beach.
        The Hyatt had five restaurants. In Swan Court, the waiters had to wear tuxedo-like uniforms created in Chicago by designers who hadn't considered Maui's tropical weather. These sweaty waiters cleaned the mirrored glass table tops with squeegees after each party left. They could easily make $150 dollars a night in tips. Since I was inexperienced, I was hired at the bottom-of-the-line restaurant, the Pavilion. I got to wear a comfortable orange Aloha shirt and a Hyatt badge with my name on it: "Jerry." Even at the Pavilion, a side order of macadamia-nut pancakes cost five dollars, which was a hell of a lot of money for pancakes in those days.
        I was the busboy for a nice local waiter named Derek. He was polite and competent, but he had trouble talking to the diners. He'd never been to the mainland, and his pidgin English was just too different from the language of American and Canadian tourists. When I couldn't stand the boredom of lining up forks and knifes on napkins, filling salt shakers, and carrying heavy trays to the busing station, that I had conversations with the customers. Derek didn't mind because he noticed his tips increasing. Soon, I was promoted to waiter, even though I knew little about the job.
        One warm night when I was still new—it was Christmas Eve—when I was still new, I completely panicked when a planeload of New Yorkers arrived and filled the restaurant, including my whole section, all at once. It was horrifying when their tour guide led them in a mass chant of "Ah-lo-HA!" The other waiters and waitresses were used to it, but I was overwhelmed.
        Suddenly I was swamped, and everybody was screaming at me. My manager, the customers, the other waitresses and waiters, and the cooks were all screaming. Everything was dim and in slow motion. It was like one of those dreams when you try to run but your feet won't move. I realized that the waiter whose section was next to mine was stealing my orders as soon as the cooks put them up. I'd bring an order to one person in a party of four, while the others at the table had to wait up to an hour for their food, which had been stolen, to be prepared all over again. Some people stormed out without paying. On one of my unpaid guest-checks, a customer had scrawled: "This is the worst service I've ever had in my life." Time stood still that night, and I almost sneaked out of the restaurant.
        Eventually, everybody left, and the restaurant quieted down. Nobody paid any attention to me. I found my time card on the giant wall of time cards, punched out, turned in my uniform, and rode my bicycle six miles home to Lahaina.
        The next day one of the cooks saved me. He taught me how to deal with my section as a whole rather than madly running around trying to satisfy individual customers. The work got better, and I started enjoying it. I had full medical insurance, made a fair salary, and got about $70 dollars a night in tips on top of that. I began saving money for a round-trip plane ticket to visit my stepfather, Leroy, who was teaching at a college in Thailand. His post cards made it seem interesting.
        After a couple of months, I was beginning to feel comfortable at the restaurant. Mavis, the hostess, clearly liked me, and it was fun to talk with her when business was slow. Kevin, ever my advisor, warned me not to go to bed with her, though. He said her brothers would make me marry her and that I'd never leave the island alive if I didn't.
        Our restaurant had three walls and a ceiling, with one side open to the sea. The flagstone floor extended out into a patio covered with tables with big umbrellas on them. Tape loops of mellow tourist music played over and over again, putting us all in a trance and making us be good wait-robots. I heard "We're going to a hukilau, huki huki huki huki huki hukilau" a million times. When tourists constantly asked, "Do you live on the island?" instead of answering rudely: "No, I live in L.A. and commute to work," I would politely say, "Yes, I live in Lahaina near the sugar mill." Invariably, their next question was: "Do you like it?" Instead of saying, "No, I really feel quite lonely and alienated here because nobody seems to want to discuss global politics with me and I'm invisible to women," I answered, "Yeah, I love it. The sunsets are so beautiful, and I love to body surf the big waves outside the harbor."
        I no longer ate alone in the employee dining room. The amazing left-over salad and day-old pastry, made for the rich and famous, tasted even better with Lucretia's charming company. Her sparkling brown eyes set off by her sun-bleached lashes and eyebrows made me glad to be alive.
        Cowardly by nature, I rarely considered pursuing Lucretia as a girlfriend. And I think she preferred the strong, macho type, anyway, even with the beatings Nathan gave her, to the pseudo-intellectual hippy type. I was still looking for a girlfriend. I was desperate for a girlfriend.
        One afternoon I rode my bicycle to work early, picked up my uniform from the uniform clerk, showered and shaved, and went to the employee dining room to get a bite to eat. Lucretia was there, sitting alone. I joined her.
        We discussed Spinoza and Nietzsche today, and then jumped to Rajneesh. I was reading the latest book of this guru/superstar from India, and pronounced it wonderful and powerful.
        "Do you actually pay money for that guy's books?" asked Lucretia, incredulous. "He's such a phony. Do you know he has over 50 Rolls Royces and an army of bodyguards with automatic weapons in his Oregon commune?"
        "Yeah, I know. But don't you see: he's purposely making himself a parody of a guru so that he can undo the concept of gurus—so that the human race will do away with gurus, and individuals will take individual responsibility for their spiritual enlightenment and their behavior on this planet."
        "Come back to Earth, Cosmo. I just saw him on the news driving one of his Rolls Royces, and he looked as happy as a child. He can't even drive them straight; I hear his men have to pull him out of ditches all the time. His commune is just a sex and drug playground for a bunch of bourgeoisie born-again Hindus."
        "Well, maybe you're right, Lucretia, but if you could internalize what I've learned from reading his book, you wouldn't be afraid to leave your house and you wouldn't be getting beat up by Nathan, and you probably wouldn't be wasting your incredible mind memorizing the orders of fat tourists."
        "What about you? That sounds like your job description, too. You . . ."
        "I'm not as smart as you, I've got a crappy education, I'm not beautiful, and I've got no money and nobody in my family willing to help me. But you, with your rich parents, you could go to any college you wanted. You could be a lawyer, a professor, a scientist, anything. Instead you let some moron stud who doesn't even know the earth is round run your life and make a slave out of you."
        "Come on, Nathan's not that bad."
        "I know that bruise on your shoulder isn't from surfing. It looks like a thumb bruise. Rajneesh teaches us the amazing power we get from realizing—"
        "Yeah, right."
        "Let me finish. You get power from realizing your oneness with the universe if you realize it in a tangible way. I mean it's like you're one with the creative force, and once you really feel it, you take control of your life. You feel empowered because you are empowered."
        Lucretia was starting to show some feeling in her pretty face, not because of what I was saying, which she thought was hippy space-cadet rambling, but because I cared about her happiness and her dignity as a human being. Somebody else started to show some feeling, too: a large, scary-looking busboy from Swan Court was giving me what they call on Maui "stink eye."
        From hitchhiking all over the United States and riding in the cars of many a madman, I'd learned to trust my intuition. This guy had to be a friend or relative of Nathan, and he meant me harm. Lucretia didn't see him. He was sitting at the table directly behind her. He could hear everything we said.
        "Anyway, Lucretia, you should check out this book. I'm almost finished with it; I'll give it to you tomorrow." I remembered that it was time to work. "Are you ready to feed the turkeys?"
        "No, but we'd better go." But she didn't move from her chair. She looked at me strangely, almost as if she were considering that I was a man and not just a philosophical sparring partner. She knew my need. "It doesn't make sense for you to live on Maui and not have fun," she said. "If you were a surfer or a scuba diver, maybe we could . . . maybe if you got into the swing of things on Maui, we might . . . Listen, Jerry. I like to talk about philosophy, but not all the time. Don't you ever just have fun?"
        My shift went great. One of the cooks shared some cocaine with me, and it made me talkative. I talked a lot to the wife of a famous baseball player, who was eating alone, and almost seduced her without trying. I was sweating from talking so much and working so hard, putting on a different show at each table. I'd be laid-back if the people wanted privacy, or an entertainer if a couple were bored with each other and having a terrible time. As usual, though, at the end of my shift, I had $70 dollars, and Lucretia had way over $100.
        In the shower room, I saw the big local guy again, and again he gave me stink eye. I had seen so many haoles get their lights punched out by locals that it didn't take any stretch of imagination for me to see myself crashing into lockers and having my head slammed against sinks and urinals and into the tile floor. I realized there was nothing for me to do but continue taking my shower. I rubbed some of the rich Hyatt complimentary shampoo into my hair.
        I saw him again as I walked down a long underground hallway to the laundry room to turn in my uniform. Now I knew I was in trouble. I couldn't think of anything I could do, though, to prevent the beating that I saw coming. Maui was too small to escape from someone who wanted to get you. What could I do? Call the cops and say that somebody who might know somebody else who might want to kill me gave me stink eye? I walked outside into the cool night and unlocked my bicycle. Every sound was magnified as I began riding out of the parking lot and onto the paved bicycle trail that ran along the beach. I knew that somewhere on this trail I would be attacked.
        I made it to my apartment without mishap. I would have been almost relieved for the local guys to have gotten it over with. For the next week I tried to stay away from Lucretia, but we ended up talking a few times anyway. Now that I'd broken the ice and gotten her to let some of her feelings come up, she was using me as a free therapist and saying things that might get me killed if Nathan's friends happened to overhear. Riding home at night was starting to make me neurotic.
        After a couple of weeks of not getting beat up, I forgot to worry about it. The big local busboy wasn't looking at me anymore. Maybe everything was cool. The ride home had been the best part of my day, and it was nice to enjoy it again.
        One night, after a hard shift, I stopped at Wahikuli Park to swim in the ocean. The moon was almost full and the water temperature was just right to refresh me and remove all the tension built up during hours of serving food and drink to tourists. I swam a long time.
        I got back on my bike and began riding home in my wet shorts and T-shirt. Everything looked surreal in the moonlight—the shiny black rocks at the shore, the palm trees, the grass of the park, the park benches and barbecues, and the yellow Jeep silently sweeping through the park between the trees and the park tables. I began riding as fast as I could. I was pumping so hard that the frame of my blue Peugeot 10-speed felt like liquid. I made it out of the park and started racing through the old Japanese graveyard. I wondered if it would be my place of death. The yellow Jeep was right behind me. Nathan cut off onto the gravel beside the bike road and then back in front of me, and I crashed into the tailgate of his Jeep, right into the demonic green dragon decal. I shook my head, and as my vision returned, I was looking into the dragon's red eyes.
        "Why you crash into my Jeep, bra?"
        "Man, you cut in front of me. But I'm sorry I hit your Jeep. I think it's beautiful."
        "I tink it beautiful, too, bra. So answer: why you hit da kine?"
        "You want to hurt me because I talked to your girlfriend. But listen . . ."
        A major kick to my head, effortless on Nathan's part. A major kick to my ribs from Nathan's friend. (It's the busboy; I was right.) I'm on the ground. Hard kick to the stomach; it feels like it's going through my stomach; I can feel it all the way to my backbone. In spite of the pain, I'm seeing this happen to me in slow motion and analyzing it like a sportscaster giving a blow-by-blow at a fight: "Jerry takes another kick to the ribs. Yes, this time some ribs are broken. Ooooh, and a great kick to the back of the head. Possible damage to the occipital lobe, which might result in permanent vision impairment. What do you think, Jerry?"
        "Yes, I agree, although I've seen harder kicks that didn't damage the brain. Wow, and there's another kick to the head and one from the other guy to the face."
        "Do you think they're going to have to kill him, Jerry?"
        "Well, Jerry, it looks that way. They've done enough visible damage that Jerry can sustain an assault-and-battery charge and put them in jail. They're probably going to have to kill him and dump him off the cliffs north of Napili."
        "Well, I don't know, Jerry. I think they've got him just at the point where he'll be too terrorized to call the police, especially because he knows Nathan is related to half the police on the island."
        "Well, you were right, Jerry, they appear to be leaving. Wait, Nathan is bending down to say something . . ."
        "Listen, broddah, you call da police, maybe I go jail, but you die, bra."
        "Ooooh, and another kick to the stomach," says the sportscaster. "Well, that's all for tonight folks, because we're losing consciousness . . ."
        When I woke up, it was still dark. I pushed and dragged my smashed bicycle to the highway and waited for a taxi. Finally an off-duty cab came by and stopped for me. It was Jeannie, a friend of my uncle, driving Unit 13, a station wagon. The car was so full of good marijuana smoke that I got high just from riding in it.
        Jeannie was a pretty blonde with a foul mouth. She was very down-to-earth and fun to talk to. But I really couldn't talk much because my ribs were starting to hurt and my upper lip was cut. It was painful to breathe. I told her I'd had a bicycle accident. I was sitting in the front with her. When she noticed blood dripping on my thighs from my cut lip, she stopped the car and got a first-aid kit from the back. In the dim glow of the dome light on the ceiling of the car, she cleaned the wounds on my lip and forehead.
        While she worked, Jeannie told me about the famous people she'd met and sold cocaine to lately at the exclusive restaurant where she worked part-time as a room-service waitress. The voice of the dispatcher came over the taxi radio: "Are you out there Unit 13? I need you to pick up a six-pack of da kine and bring it to the dispatch station."
        "Fuck you, Freddy," said Jeannie into her microphone. She told me that she was pregnant and that Freddy might be the father. "Now he thinks he owns me."
        When I got to my apartment, I told Jeannie I'd pay her the next day, because my money was all wet from swimming with it in my pocket. She helped me get the wreck of my bike out of the back of the cab. I got a good look at it under the parking lot lights and realized that it was totaled. I left it sitting by a dumpster, then painfully pulled myself up the stairs. Inside, I looked into the full-length mirror and was shocked by my reflection. It was as if my whole body had been rearranged. It was hard to say what exactly was wrong, but I just didn't line up right anymore. It was like somebody had reshuffled me.
        I washed down five aspirin and with a beer and went to sleep. I woke up an hour later in excruciating pain. I took a taxi to the hospital in Wailuku and got my ribs taped up and some Percocets to numb my pain for a few days.
        My rent was incredibly high for the little apartment I lived in, even though I shared it with a roommate who paid half. Apartments were dear on Maui and I was lucky to have it. When the doctor told me that I had several serious rib fractures and that I'd have to take five or six weeks off work, I started worrying about how I was going to make it. Rent was almost due. Uncle Glenn had just lost his apartment—the owners had converted it into a condo and put it up for sale—so he was happy to move into my place, and I took the money I would have spent for rent and put it in the bank.
        I moved into Kobotaki's, kind of a flophouse where many of the cab drivers lived. Most of the tenants lived in a large plantation shack built on stilts, or in places adjacent to it. The dwelling spaces that made up Kobotaki's had interesting names that pretty well described them: The Cave, The Closet, The Van, The Tree House. I lived in "Freddy and Dorrita's Place," named after the passionate couple who once lived there; it was one of the luxury suites of Kobotaki's. I had a refrigerator, a cold-water sink, and a stove.
        My rent was only $100 a month, utilities free. This was quite a bargain on Maui, where sometimes waiters were living five people in a one-bedroom apartment to save money. The reason it was available to me was that I was related to a cab driver—so the coke dealers and marijuana growers at Kobo's knew they could trust me not to get them busted. Also, I could tolerate the giant roaches that roamed freely throughout the complex. I didn't mind the communal bathrooms and showers. And I wasn't terrified by Russ, a wild haole marijuana grower who, supposedly, could beat up any human on earth.
        I took it easy while my ribs were healing. I planted some primeval-looking cycads to add to the Garden-of-Eden ambience around our meager hovels. When I was hungry, I could go outside and grab a mango or a bananna, and the fresh papayas off the trees were sweet and refreshing. I cooked brown rice and tofu, read Eastern philosophy, and meditated a lot.
        In order to meditate without being attacked by mosquitos and centipedes, I built a meditation protector. I bent coat hangers into a cube-shaped frame big enough to cover my body and draped it with mosquito netting. I would raise and lower my meditation cube by a rope-and-pulley system I'd attached to the ceiling. I read the books of Rajneesh and talked to my guru, Jim Black, about enlightenment.
        Jim Black, who lived in The Cave, had no running water and cooked with a hot plate. His dwelling was constructed of screen and wooden slats nailed to the stilts that supported the main shack. His floor was dirt with a carpet over it. He had a good tape player, and he played reggae music so loud that the whole place could hear it. Jim was living in his sorry $50-a-month cave because he'd egoed out on cocaine and lost his taxi business and gotten into extreme debt. After he started to realize that he was the Messiah, it was hard for him to see the use of sitting in a hot cab all day and taking tourists from Lahaina to the hotels in Kaanapali and back. When he did drive, his long, long beard and crazy uncombed hair were upsetting to the more conservative tourists, and when he preached to them, they'd become frightened and forget to tip. "We are all in a maze that does have a way out of it!" he would proclaim.
        The thing he used to say that struck me was that "Enlightenment is possible." The path through the maze in which each individual is wandering lost actually exists at this moment, he believed. It's just hard to figure out what the path is.
        To discover his path, Jim did a lot of LSD and cocaine. He smoked big joints of Maui buds. If I took only two hits of one of his joints, I would be incapacitated for half the day. One time I had to crawl back to my room. In this overly-stoned condition, I watched Reagan on TV and thought I was actually seeing the devil.
        After he lost his taxi and spent some time in jail, Jim didn't think he was the Messiah anymore. Jim was taking a vacation from the fast pace of being a cocaine dealer. He was cutting down on cocaine, and his new work was good exercise and quiet. He got a percentage of wild man Russ' marijuana profit for simply carrying water up the mountain on his back and watering Russ' plants a couple of times a week. Being a farmer's helper was a good way for Jim to support himself while he did his "real" work as guru and astrologer.
        While my ribs were healing, I got a job dispatching for Pacific Taxi, the company Jeannie and my Uncle Glenn drove for. It was fun talking over the radio to the stoned-out drivers. The drivers were presentable and friendly, and the tourists never suspected that all of the young drivers and a few of the old ones were smoking killer bud joints all day between runs. The night drivers added alcohol to their high. I liked the challenge of maintaining order among the ten to twelve insane drivers that were on the road during my day shift.
        The dispatch office was a little stall in a small corrugated metal industrial building in Lahaina. It was a meeting place for the drivers to make drug deals, sexual liaisons with each other, and share a joint. It was right next door to Bob Giso's TV repair shop, where huge round Bob lived and worked in a maze of garbage and broken TVs stacked five and six high. If you'd bring him a pizza or some other take-out food, he'd come out of his maze like a smart laboratory rat and rub his eyes in the sunshine. He'd get your taxi radio working again for free. His assistant, Crazy Robbie greeted you with some insane exclamation—"Have you had an enema today?"
        Motorcycle Mike lived at Kobotaki's right above my head when I looked out my window. He lived in The Tree House. He was into the advanced stages of alcoholism and always down on his luck. But he was the nicest guy to talk to and pretty smart. His slanted studio hovel, an actual tree house in a big mango tree, went for $50 a month, like Jim's cave. I saw inside it once, and it was like a trash can half full of beer cans, cigarette butts, and cigarette packages. But one thing that Mike always had that was perfect was his motorcycle. It was a cherry 1500 c.c. Suzuki that could go 160 miles per hour on a straightaway.
        Mike was famous lately because he had lost the police on a high-speed chase that went almost all the way around the island. In those days, the police drove their own very fast cars, and it was especially hard to lose them. They had customized Camaros, Mustangs, and GTOs with slicks on the back and chrome pipes on the sides, and some of the cars actually had flames painted on their fenders. The cops were subsidized hotrodders. They burned rubber when the one traffic light in town changed to green. Anyway, Mike was pretty cocky lately, so cocky that he kicked Russ's dog. It attacked him while he was crossing the field to the liquor store. It would have been much better to have let the dog bite him a few times than to have to face Russ after kicking it.
        Motorcycle Mike came into the dispatch office while I was working. He was shaking and white with fear. He passed me in the narrow room and stood with his back to the wall facing the entrance. He was holding a large hammer. Mike had gotten word that Russ was on his way to obliterate him. My ribs still ached, and I was torn between my duty to man the dispatch office, and my sense of self preservation. I decided Mike was hysterical and that Russ would not appear.
        Russ, wearing rubber slippers, surfer shorts, and his Lahaina Mongoose baseball team shirt, walked inside casually. The dispatch office was narrow. I was trapped between Russ and Mike, in striking distance of both men. Now it was too late to move. I was afraid to breathe lest I somehow set off the conflagration. As Mike raised the hammer to defend himself, Russ, truly calm, said, "Mike, drop the hammer."
        Mike dropped the hammer, and it clunked to the floor right behind my chair. Mike didn't even make a move to stop him as Russ slammed him against the wall with one hand. Mike crumpled to the floor, unconscious. Actually, he got off easy. When I got home, I found out that earlier that day, Russ had thrown a young cab driver into the dumpster behind Kobotaki's, and the young man had sustained a concussion and a broken shoulder. Mike was perfectly OK when he came to, and after a few drinks and a few high-speed half-block-long wheelies on his motorcycle, he had forgotten the whole incident.
        When my ribs got better, I went back to work at the Hyatt, but this time I did the breakfast and lunch shifts. I didn't want to see Lucretia anymore. I was short on cash, so I put off buying another bicycle. I rode to work and back on a blue tourist bus.
        I had to be at work early for the breakfast shift. I'd rush to work without having breakfast, thinking I could hold out on a cup of coffee, but the smell of the good, expensive food there would always end up making me feel ravenous. I'd grab half-eaten macadamia-nut pancakes right off the plates I was bussing and carefully stuff my mouth, biting from the side opposite where somebody had eaten. Then I'd have to walk around and act like I wasn't chewing so my manager wouldn't know I was eating on the job. I felt unbearably hot running around in this restaurant in the daytime, and because the tourists were generally sober during the breakfast and lunch rushes, my tips were decreasing. I decided to go back to the night shift.
        Luckily, Lucretia had moved up to Swan Court. For some reason, the Swan Court waitrons didn't hang out in the employee dining room with us lowlifes from the other four restaurants. And Mavis, the hostess, had quit, so I didn't have any dangerous temptations to deal with. My only problem was transportation—the tourist busses stopped running before my shift was over, so I had to hitchhike home.
        My first night back on the dinner shift, I heard a gorgeous woman in the employee dining room say she was an artist. Desperation overcame my shyness, and I immediately began talking to her about art. I didn't know much about art, but enough to ask her questions.
        Her name was Marilyn. She worked in one of the Hyatt's many gift shops, selling jewelry and gold chains and to tourists. Even under her Hyatt smock, I could tell she had a body like a California bathing-suit model. Her shiny light brown hair flowed around her big green eyes and high cheekbones. Her nose was large and her lips were full. I fell in love at first sight. She told me she had some paintings in a Lahaina gallery that we could see sometime. She even offered to meet me in the Hyatt parking lot when we both got off work. We could ride somewhere to get a drink, she said. Apparently she'd seen me riding my bicycle home from work before I crashed it into Nathan's Jeep.
        She was waiting for me when I came outside to the parking lot. I thought it was a little odd that she introduced me to her bicycle: "This is my bike, Skippy!" she said. "Where's your bike?" "My bike is totaled. Let's take a cab—I'll pay."
        We put her old bike in the back of an Alii cab—Pacific Taxi's rival company—and got a ride into Lahaina. I paid the driver, and we went to the Blue Max to have a drink. When we got there, the place was going nuts. Elton John was playing an old piano on the balcony, and Front Street was completely stopped for blocks each way. People piled out of their cars to stand by the seawall and look up at this famous performer. His playing was amazingly hot. He had the whole street rocking. Marilyn and I crowded in. I drank beer and she had Pepsi. Then I walked her and Skippy home.
        She lived with an old Hungarian man, who played the violin and was supposedly a gifted psychic. I found a guitar in the house and played music with him that night, and Marilyn was impressed.
        Marilyn was strange, though. After having several dates with her, she told me that she didn't want to hold hands or kiss. She washed her hands a lot, I noticed. When she came to Kobotaki's to see my garden and my cycad plants, I could hear her when she used the toilet. She flushed it the whole time she was on it so nobody would hear her bodily sounds. Afterwards, she washed her hands for about five minutes.
        We spent a lot of our free time together, but it became obvious that this young Canadian woman wasn't going to go to bed with me in the near future. This was quite frustrating. I began to realize why she was so available that she'd even go out with a guy too poor to buy a bicycle. However, even though there were disadvantages to this relationship, I enjoyed her company and the company of her roommate, the old Hungarian psychic. In him I finally had somebody safe to discuss philosophy with.
        One night when I was hitchhiking home from the Hyatt, a black Volkswagen stopped, and I got in. The driver had interesting, strong features and straight jet-black hair. It was a dark night, and his instrument lights were burnt out, so the only light you could see inside the car was from the red digital readout on his cassette player. It made his pale face look ghoulish. He wore a black jacket over a black shirt and black Levi's. As he drove towards Lahaina, I told him I'd just gotten off work waiting tables. I asked him what he did for a living. He said he was a stage hypnotist. I had just checked out a book on hypnosis from the library that day, and I thought it was amazingly synchronistic that a hypnotist had picked me up.
        I told him that I was very interested in learning how to hypnotize people. He said he'd be glad to show me. He pulled off the highway and drove to the end of a little street that went right up to the beach next to the Buddhist temple. He explained various techniques, then said he was going to hypnotize me. Just when he was ready to start, a car full of locals raced down the little street, and when they got to the dead end, they did a screeching burnoff, turned the car around, and took off, narrowly missing the black Volkswagen. The hypnotist suggested that we drive somewhere more quiet. I thought this was a great idea. I was wired from waiting tables, and I didn't have anything better to do.
        We got on the highway and headed back in the direction we had come from. We passed the Hyatt and the other hotels and the golf courses in Kaanapali and kept going until we got past the condos and restaurants in Napili. We were now on a barely paved road surrounded by jungle and rocks, and there was no traffic. It was about one in the morning.
        He grabbed a long black metal flashlight out of the car, and we walked out to some high, rocky cliffs. We could dimly see the ocean, dark and agitated, far below. He told me to sit on a rock and relax. He asked me to take 100 deep breaths, very deep. I did as he asked. I thought this was an odd way to hypnotize somebody, but I wasn't suspicious of this guy because he seemed so nice. Suddenly he was behind me with both hands on my neck pressing hard with his fingertips to block off the blood flow through my jugular veins. I realized the guy was nuts and that I was in great danger. I pretended I was Captain Kirk on Star Trek, being tortured by aliens, and I resolved not to lose consciousness no matter what. I started passing out and slid off the rock I had been sitting on. The hypnotist was on top of me, his large white face descending towards my face to kiss me.
        "Stop. I don't want you to kiss me," I said. I tried to hypnotize him by eye contact and calmness. "I have a girlfriend," I lied, "and I'm not interested in men this way." I knew that he could beat me with his flashlight, do anything he wanted, and then throw my body off the cliffs. There was no reason for anybody to be driving out there at night and no chance of a witness. I looked at his shiny black boots as he slowly stood up above me.
        He surprised me by being very contrite. He helped me up, and after apologizing sincerely, drove me back to Lahaina. We talked about child psychology and the importance of the first three years of a child's life.
        Because of this hitchhiking experience, I decided that I didn't want to deal with transportation to and from the Hyatt anymore, so I quit my job. I started driving Number 9 for Big John, a fat Danish man who wanted to be a writer but who was too drunk most of the time to write. His car smelled so bad after he finished his day shift that it took me a half hour to disinfect it. I brought my own towels and spray cleaner to clean the grime from the vinyl seats. His fat arm had worn the paint off the top of the driver's-side door. The rear axle was so worn that when you went around a corner, the body of the station wagon taxi would slide several inches from one side to the other and clunk. The tires were bald.
        I did very well. Since I didn't smoke marijuana very often and was too poor to eat out, I was constantly in the car during my shift, from about four in the evening until two or three in the morning. The other drivers would miss radio calls when they got out of their cars to smoke dope, drink in bars, and eat out. I'd get long runs taking rich drunks to hotels on the other side of the island, in Wailuku or Kahului, or down the coast to Kihei. I drove in shorts and beach slippers, and now that I was free of the Hyatt dress code, I could let my hair and beard grow out. Soon other owners were vying for my services. I was the only young driver who wasn't stoned all the time. Maybe my drug was depression. For months I had The Idiot by Dostoyevsky on my dashboard, for reading when business got slow.
        When one of the two major tourist seasons came to a close, the only way to make it in taxiland was to sell marijuana. I usually had a few ounces under the seat to sell to tourists. I had a way to figure out if they were plainclothes cops or not. Cops would usually start talking about drugs soon after they got in the car, but tourists were shy about it. If I had young male tourists in my car, I'd wait until the run was about two thirds over, and then I'd put the one tape I had—some heavy-metal band—in the old eight-track and crank up the volume. Always, when they heard the music, they'd say, "Do you know where we can get some Maui Wowie?" "No problem," I'd say, reaching under the seat and producing a huge bag of bud leaf or a beautiful big bud that I'd hermetically sealed in Uncle Glenn's kitchen vegetable sealer. I was starting to make good money again, and my dream of traveling to Thailand became, once more, a possibility.
        Living in this tropical paradise was all right. Things were looking up. This was the first job I'd had that didn't seem like work. I'd cover my dashboard with huge night-blooming cereus blossoms that grew on cactuses at the roadside (the most sexual flowers I'd ever seen), and give them to tourist ladies. Husbands would have their wives pose for pictures with the blossoms and the nice hippy cab driver, and of course I'd get good tips.
        I entertained my fares with interesting stories about the island, things that other drivers wouldn't talk about, things the Chamber of Commerce didn't want them to know. Tourists get sick of having everything be too perfect, too much like Disneyland, and they really enjoyed hearing about the seamier side of life on Maui.
        "If you'll look up towards that mountain on your left, you can see jungle vegetation. Those mountains used to be covered with teak wood, but the missionaries and European businessmen exported it all over 100 years ago. You know what the biggest cash crop on Maui is today? No, not sugarcane, no, not pineapples. Give up? It's marijuana. Those hills are full of marijuana planted by growers, who must hike up precarious jungle trails with water on their backs several times a week. Some of the growers were Vietnam veterans, and they have put what they learned in Vietnam to good use. Just yesterday a grower had his leg blown off by a booby trap when he accidentally got too close to a rival grower's plants. That beautiful island off to your right is Kahoolawe, an ancient burial place of Hawaiian kings. Since World War II, the U.S. Navy has been using it as a bombing range, and now there's so much unexploded ordinance there that it's too dangerous for a person to walk on it. There are a few brave goats living there, though. Kahoolawe has become a rallying point for local people, who are becoming increasingly angry about infringements on their rights."
        Since there were economical tourist busses running regularly the six miles between Lahaina and the hotels, most of the people who chose to ride taxis were fairly well-to-do. It was fun to surprise them. Jeannie's huge German shepherd, Pax, knew the difference between Pacific and Alii Cabs. He'd actually leave his home upcountry by jumping in the open window of any Pacific taxi he'd find parked at the little market near Jeannie's house and ride to town. He'd cruise town for a while, then jump in the window of any Pacific taxi heading back upcountry towards Jeannie's house. The tourists would be shocked and amazed when this huge animal would suddenly jump in my window, sit beside me, and lick my face. "Howzit, Pax! How's my buddy?" My passengers would decide that Pax was part of the local color and relax. They'd get a big kick out of it.
        One night while I was cruising the hotels, Jeannie called me on her taxi radio and invited me over for dinner. When a woman cab driver invited you over for dinner, it meant sex for sure, so I was kind of overjoyed. I radioed the dispatcher that I'd be off the road for a few hours. Then I remembered that she was pregnant.
        Jeannie lived past Napili in a Quonset hut left over from World War II. It was comfortable inside with good carpeting and nice furniture. She cooked a great dinner, preceded and followed by bud joints. I was so sensitive to marijuana that I was putty in her hands. I was easy to seduce, even though I had reservations about going to bed with a pregnant woman, especially one I hardly knew. She didn't look pregnant, though, and except for Dorrita, she was the prettiest driver in the company. You would think Jeannie was the archetypal wholesome blond girl-next-door, until you heard her rough language and watched her rolling big bud joints like a Rastafarian.
        I said, "Is your old boyfriend Freddie going to come here and kill me for being in bed with you?"
        "That asshole couldn't hurt a fly. Besides, he's forgotten about me and the baby because that fucking backstabbing bitch Dorrita just came back to the island."
        On that romantic note, we indulged in blissful marijuana enhanced sex.

        I stayed at Jeannie's house a lot to escape the weirdness of Kobotaki's. Every day there were little rainstorms followed by glorious rainbows above the green mountains. Across the highway from Jeannie's house was a postcard-perfect beach that nobody seemed to know about. I swam nude in the clear blue-green ocean, ran with Jeannie's dog, Pax, and meditated cross legged on the gravelly sand. Jeannie and I camped, hiked, had sex a lot, and sailed in rented sailboats. Her cocaine income was a boost to my low-income lifestyle. She dressed me like cool Maui guys were supposed to dress, and through her, I suddenly had friends.
        Jeannie always had the TV on, so reading Dostoyevsky, Camus, Malamud, and all the other depressing writers I liked became impossible. I became tan, strong, and more normal. I wasn't always thinking about politics, and I avoided looking at Reagan on TV.
        For my birthday—I was 24—Jeannie rented a large sailboat and invited a bunch of people, including Uncle Glenn, my stepfather Leroy's brother. Glenn was a short, handsome, hairy man who had had hundreds of gorgeous, perfect tourist girls during the year that I lived on mellow Maui. He brought some mushrooms and buds and had us all out of our minds by the time the boat left the harbor. Usually, when Jeannie and I rented sailboats, I was the captain, but today was my birthday, and I didn't know or care who was driving. The boat went along nicely. Many of us were naked. This was in the days when most of the beaches on Maui were nude beaches, and after drinking a few beers and smoking some good bud, nobody thought twice about taking off their clothes. Dolphins played around the boat and swam in formation as we headed out to sea. I played syncopated rhythms for them on the hull of the boat as I sat on the bowsprit, taking in the beauty of the universe.
        Then, I don't remember how it happened, but I suddenly realized that I was in the water. I think it was Glenn who put a good diving mask and snorkel on me, gave me a rope to hold on to, and pushed me into the ocean. I absolutely became a dolphin. I was under water and could see perfectly with the mask and breathe easily through the snorkel. The ocean caressed my naked body as I coursed through it as fast as the boat could pull me. I could see colorful coral and exotic fluorescent tropical fish. I could see my brother and sister dolphins. The mushrooms I'd eaten were starting to kick in, and the cosmic feeling of being a sea creature again after all these millions of years was so beautiful that I had tears running down my cheeks inside of the diving mask. Somebody must have pulled me out eventually to see if I was still alive. It was the best birthday I'd ever had. I loved Uncle Glenn and Jeannie and all her taxi, cocaine, and marijuana-grower friends on the boat.
        After a couple of fun months, Jeannie's pregnant belly got larger and larger, and we could no longer body surf, camp, or run on the beach. We both began to realize we had very little in common.
        Her mother flew in from Seattle and moved in with Jeannie. Margie, who was very successful in real estate, planned to stay with her daughter for a long time. She'd had her sleek black BMW shipped over to Maui in advance so it would arrive when she did. Thinking Jeannie and I were a real couple rather than casual lovers, Margie treated me as if I were a son-in-law. She nagged at me until I rewired the whole house, put on a new roof of corrugated tin, and caulked the windows. I stayed away for days at a time, only to be drawn back by Jeannie's cooking. On Wednesdays, I'd go with Jeannie to her Lamaze natural-childbirth class.
        I began studying Transcendental Meditation, which was big on Maui at that time. It only cost $165 dollars to get my secret mantra from one of the Maharishi's official TM teachers, a mantra which served me well as I sat cross-legged every morning and silently repeated it in my mind thousands of times. Even though TM was pretty much a scam to help Maharishi catch up to Rajneesh in Rolls Royces, the fact that it cost money made me be more disciplined about it than I was about the Zen meditation I already practiced from time to time. It was an amazing experience for me to just stop and clear my mind on a daily basis. I began to feel more calm and focused than ever before. But I also began to feel a kind of spiritual hunger.
        Even though I was having a good time, I was still lonely. My spiritual hunger, my longing to be in love with a woman, and my political concerns all mixed together in my mind. Reagan's "doublespeak" was as intense and exaggerated as that in Orwell's 1984, only this was real life. I felt guilty for the hedonistic life we were all living on Maui. "If there's ever a revolution, it's sure not going to start here," I thought.
        The streets of Lahaina remained violent, even as the world as a whole. On my nights off, I'd walk up and down Front Street alone, listening to the music coming from the bars, watching the beautiful women in their island fashions, and feeling drained and hot and frustrated. No matter how peaceful the town seemed, there was always the possibility of sudden violence. It was not unusual to see haole guys get beaten half to death by locals. Sometimes, when I was working, the fights would come right up to my taxi at the cabstand across from Anchor Deli.
        Once, I saw two white guys win. They walked back and forth like proud roosters. They were tourists who knew martial arts, and they had just easily dispatched two local guys, beating them soundly but doing no real damage to them. The local guys ran off down the street. A moment later, though, a car full of their local friends pulled up to finish the fight; haoles can never win a fight on Maui. The white guys were beaten to unconsciousness.
        Sometimes, there wouldn't be any fights for weeks. Front Street would be full of tourists milling up and down the sidewalk, going into the picturesque buildings of the old whaling town to buy T-shirts and souvenirs. But always there was the yellow Jeep. I'd make a right turn on Front Street and find myself directly behind Nathan's Jeep in traffic, looking into the red eyes of the dragon. There was still a scratch on the dragon decal where my bicycle had made impact. Sometimes the Jeep would be behind me.
        There was a big concert at one of the hotels one night, and Nathan's Jeep must have been out of order. He was standing in front of Anchor Deli watching the traffic, looking for a friend to take him to the concert. He was good friends with the son of Big John, the owner of the cab I drove, and he must have recognized the car as I drove by. He must have flagged me expecting a free ride, but I never saw him. Later in the evening, I stopped at Anchor Deli to grab a beer to drink in the cab. I left the keys in the ignition like always. Why would anybody steal a cab on Maui, especially an old slimy one like Unit 9? When I came out with the beer, I noticed the keys were missing. Nathan and a haole approached me. The haole was Roger, Big John's son. Nathan had the keys in his hand, tossing them up and catching them.
        "Why you no pick me up, bra?"
        "I didn't see you or I sure would have picked you up."
        "You drive right past me. How come?
        "I really didn't see you, man. I'm sorry."
        Whap!—a karate punch to the mouth. I, with no shame, kind of bowed, duplicating the body language of a child towards an angry parent. "Don't hit me," I said, backing up very slowly. I could see myself being destroyed in front of the cabstand where so many others had met a similar fate. "I'm really sorry. If I'd seen you, I swear I would have stopped. Anytime you need a ride, just flag me down . . ." Whoosh!—a kick to the head, but a light one. Nathan was lackadaisical this time about beating me up—I wasn't even a worthy punching bag for him. He threw the keys at my chest and he and Roger walked away.
        Motorcycle Mike, driving Unit 13 that night, was parked next to me at the cabstand. He had a .45 aimed at Nathan's head the whole time from the window of his cab. It's lucky that Nathan was in a good mood that night. If he had hit me again, Mike would have shot him. Mike and I leaned against our cabs and drank beers while I settled down and stopped shaking.
        I told Mike I was OK and not to say anything about what had happened, but he couldn't keep his mouth shut, and he told everything to Big John, who was drunkenly dispatching that night. Later, when I turned in my car, John was furious. He saw my swollen lip and said, "That does it. I'm going to kick my fucking son out of the house once and for all."
        "What does my getting beat up have to do with your son?"
        "Mike told me Roger was there with Nathan. He should have stopped Nathan. That fuckin' Nathan is nothing but a criminal."
        "Don't kick Roger out of the house. It's no big deal. I'm OK."
        "No, my mind's made up."
        The next morning Crazy Robbie, from the TV repair shop next to the dispatch office, came tearing into Kobotaki's on a bicycle with a big stick bungee-corded to the rack. "Jerry! Jerry! Nathan's coming with a whole bunch of mokes to get you." Robbie was going to protect me with that stick.
        "Thanks, man," I said. "You'd better take off before they kill you. I'll call the police. Don't worry. I've got a gun."
        I was relieved to see Robbie ride away. I called the police. Then I looked through the box of things I'd brought from the mainland and found a .25 caliber woman's purse gun I used to carry when I made my rounds at the L.A. motel where I had been a desk clerk. It was an automatic that held six shots in its clip. I removed the clip, loaded it, and slid it back in place. I cocked the pistol to put one in the chamber, and removed the clip to add another bullet to make it full again. Now I had seven shots.
        I sat on the floor watching my front door, ready to shoot Nathan and his friends if they got here and tried to break in before the police showed up.
        Two cars full of locals and the police arrived at the same time. I left my gun inside and walked out to meet Nathan and two big officers. The cops got out of one of the new uniform cars, a boring Ford LTD in light blue, and they both looked very serious.
        Nathan was upset that his friend had been kicked out of his house by Big John because of me. Big John's son, Roger, was a local haole. Since he'd grown up on the island, he spoke pidgin, fought with his feet, and was accepted by the locals, who were mostly of Asian and Hawaiian descent.
        "What kind of trouble is my nephew in now?" asked the bigger cop, putting his hand on Nathan's shoulder.
        In my most refined vocabulary, I told him what had happened. I felt like a pioneer. With two armed officers standing beside me, I thought: "This is the first time a haole has actually had the opportunity to reason with angry locals without getting beat up mid-sentence."
        I talked about the suburban neighborhood in California where I grew up, how fights were very rare and then only for the most serious of reasons. "Just because I accidentally passed you in my taxi when you needed a ride is no cause for violence."
        Nathan discussed his neighborhood when he was growing up, where you had to maintain face and respect. You could get beaten or stabbed just for looking at someone wrong. "You giv'um one guy stink eye, he cut you, bra."
        I could hardly understand Nathan's pidgin English. I began to feel that even though Maui had an American flag stuck in it, it was still a foreign country in many ways.
        The cop advised me to go to Big John's and talk him into letting Roger move back into the house. After the two cars full of locals and the police car drove away, I did so immediately. Big John relented.
        Now I was driving taxi with a loaded gun by my side. This was definitely not what I'd come to Maui for. Nathan's yellow Jeep seemed to be everywhere. I was almost afraid to look in my rear-view mirror when I drove down Front Street. I decided to go to Jeannie's place and hide out for a while.

        A few mornings later, I was doing blissful Transcendental Meditation on Jeannie's bed as the aroma the excellent breakfast Jeannie and her mother were cooking wafted into the little bedroom. Suddenly I heard Pax barking and snarling wildly. I looked out the window and saw some cops disguised as hippies stomping through the side yard. One was carrying a ladder. I jumped out of bed and ran to the living room window just in time to see one of the cops shoot Pax right in the forehead, I suppose in self defense. Another cop pounded on the front door.
        They had found several large marijuana plants on Jeannie's roof. In the Quonset hut next door, rented by Jeannie's friends, they found several pounds of buds under a pyramid in a room devoted to imparting cosmic pyramid power to marijuana. An officer reached under the pyramid and took the pot. We sat indoors all day while the police investigated. Jeannie was sobbing hysterically about Pax, who she could see lying out in the front yard bleeding from the head. She desperately wanted to hold him, but they wouldn't let her go outside. I was broken hearted, too. Pax had been a lot warmer towards me and more fun than most of the humans I'd met on Maui.
        They took Jeannie and her neighbors to jail, but believed me when I said that I had nothing to do with the marijuana growing. One of the officers found a little hashish pipe in Jeannie's dresser and asked me if it was mine. "I don't need to smoke marijuana," I said. "I've found the inner peace of merging with the Godhead through Transcendental Meditation as practiced by my spiritual master Maharishi Mahesh . . ."
        Now I was alone at Jeannie's house with her furious mother, Margie, and a dead dog to bury. Why did everything have to be so weird on Maui? I wondered.
        Margie and I watched the news on TV as we sadly ate our dinner in the living room. Suddenly Annette's face came on the screen. Annette was a Pacific Taxi driver and tour guide. The newscaster said that she'd been raped and left for dead. Two men had hidden inside her VW-van taxi when she got out to go into a convenience store and kidnapped her when she got back in. They threw her unconscious body on the highway when they were finished with her, and a tourist who almost ran her over in a rental car saved her and brought her to the hospital.
        I saw her a few weeks later. She had a dull look on her face. She talked slower and had become a born-again Christian, but otherwise she was alright.
        Things were getting too intense. I decided I needed a vacation. Five million tourists a year can't be all wrong, I thought. I asked Margie if I could borrow her BMW for a few days so I could go camping on Maui's beautiful north shore, away from the craziness of Lahaina. She said no problem.
        I walked to a pay phone so Margie wouldn't hear and called Marilyn, the pretty artist who worked at the Hyatt gift shop, to see if she wanted to go. Sure.
        I picked her up in town the next morning and we took off to circumnavigate the island. We headed off towards Kihei, drinking beer and laughing as we lived the rich tourist life in our big BMW, a good tape blaring through the speakers of the Blaupunkt stereo and the air conditioner on high. If I had taken a look at the map, I would have remembered that part of the highway around the island wasn't paved. Part of it wasn't even a road. At first the dirt road wasn't too bad. The black BMW was covered with red volcanic soil, but that could be washed off.
        I was a little too drunk by the time we got to the rough part. I went the wrong way around a huge hole and the car slid down a rocky bank, crashing into a kiawe tree. Now I was sober. Marilyn was pissed off. She walked down to the ocean and washed her hands in it. I figured we were about 10 miles from the nearest phone, which would be in the town of Makena. I looked at the map and realized that I could take a shortcut and make it in about five miles by walking across the Ulupalakua Ranch. But this would mean walking through marijuana territory.
        I decided that Marilyn and I looked enough like lost tourists that we wouldn't be perceived as marijuana thieves, and I was getting paranoid about the possibility of staying out there in no-man's land all night trying to sleep in a steeply-slanted German luxury car. We started walking across the rough terrain in our rubber sandals. It was very hot and we had no water, only a warm can of beer each. We had a bag of Maui potato chips and a couple of tofu sandwiches in my day pack. Almost immediately, we came into a place of rich and varied vegetation. As we examined blossoms and seed pods, we became excited junior botanists and almost forgot our problems. We didn't even notice that we were just a couple of feet away from a marijuana plantation.
        Suddenly a very white man, maybe an albino, wearing camouflage pants and wielding an AK47 assault rifle, appeared over a hill, accompanied by a black Doberman. The man went down on one knee and aimed his rifle at us. We both ran through the rocks and vegetation as fast as we could go. One of my sandals fell apart, and I kicked it off. I ran in a ridiculous scared-rabbit pattern while Marilyn made a beeline towards the BMW. Bullets whizzed through the thick foliage and pinged off rocks. I don't think the guy was really trying to kill us, but I'm not sure. We both made it back to the car and got inside, as if somehow the car was going to save us. We cautiously peeked out of the car and saw the man standing on a cliff above us. He was laughing. Marilyn's feet were cut pretty badly. Mine were OK, but one of my big toenails had broken in half. It was really easy to get staph infections on Maui, so I always carried a tube of antibiotic ointment in my day pack. I washed Marilyn's feet in the ocean and gently rubbed the ointment on her wounds.
        In spite of our troubles, God must have been smiling on me. I had discovered Marilyn's erogenous zone: her feet! We made love in the sand and in the ocean and in the car. She dug her fingernails into my back aggressively. (I was glad that she was always so scrupulous about washing her hands). We shared one more warm beer that was in the car and went to sleep—she in the front seat and me in the rear—with our legs slanting down towards the ocean.
        The next morning we flagged down some local guys in a four-wheel-drive pickup, and they towed us out. I thanked them and gave them a plastic film container full of good marijuana. Our vacation was over. We raced to a body shop in Kahului and left the car. Marilyn and I hitchhiked back to Lahaina.
        We got off near Marilyn's house, and I walked her home. When we got there, I invited myself in and had a glass of water. "Jerry, I want to show you something."
        She led me into her room and opened her desk drawer. From the drawer she removed an airline ticket folder. She opened the folder and showed me a one-way ticket to Canada. My heart started pounding. "I'm leaving for Canada soon, Jerry. You are very special to me, but my time on Maui is over."
        "Is it because of what happened on our trip?"
        "No, I was going to leave anyway."
        "When are you leaving?"
        "Next week."
        "Why do you want to freeze your ass off in Canada when you could spend the winter with me on magical Maui?"
        "If you must know, I have ovarian cancer, and I want to go home to have an operation."
        "Well, they've got good doctors here. Why don't you just have the operation here?"
        "Because if you talk to anybody who has had surgery on this island, they don't have a lot of good things to say about the doctors. And besides, I'm a Canadian citizen, and I can get my operation for free in Canada."
        "Will you come back? I hardly know you, but I want to know you, I want to be with you." I was crying, but it wasn't really about Marilyn leaving. I found myself thinking of Lucretia and thinking more of my dread of loneliness than actually missing Marilyn and her stupid bike, Skippy. My back was beginning to smart from Marilyn's nails. She had actually broken the skin in a lot of places.
        "Everybody is crazy here, Jerry. Nobody's really happy here. The tourists are mostly hot and depressed, frantically trying to fill up their time, turning themselves into red lobsters under the sun so they can go back to the mainland and show off their tans. And all of us haoles in the tourist business don't belong here, either. We're just long-term tourists. How many locals do you know? Are you friends with any of them? We're just hiding out from reality here because we're afraid to grow up."
        "What's so good about growing up?" I asked. "When you get back to the mainland, you'll remember: everybody's crazy there, too. And maybe you haven't noticed lately, but you're pretty crazy yourself. You're right, though. We don't really belong here. I have one local friend—you know Kevin at the Hyatt—and he's as American as apple pie. But what am I going to do? Go back to L.A.? Even San Francisco is too cold for me. There's no way I could make it in Canada, even if you wanted me to go with you."
        She was touched by my crying, and for the first time she asked me to spend the night at her house. I declined her offer; I was too freaked out about the car and how I was going to get the money to fix it. There was no way I had the courage to tell Margie that I'd destroyed the side of her perfect car. I needed to be alone to plan out my next move. I hugged Marilyn tightly and kissed her and walked off down the highway past the sugar mill and down the little street that led to Kobotaki's.
        It was about four in the afternoon. I hadn't actually told Margie when I'd return with her car, so I figured I had about two more days before she'd worry enough to call the police. I went up the stairs to the landlord's place at Kobotaki's and knocked on the door to borrow his phone. Teddy answered the door and invited me in.
        "Wanna smoke a joint." It wasn't a question on Maui. I took one small hit so I wouldn't get too zoned out to take care of business, and asked if I could use his phone to call my uncle Glenn. I shouldn't have mentioned my uncle, because Teddy hated his guts. Teddy had recently come close to killing him because Glenn had picked up a good airport fare that the dispatch office had given to Teddy. He had found Glenn later that evening in the Pioneer Inn and had thrown him from his bar stool. He raised a heavy wooden chair above his head, ready to bring it crashing down on Glenn's body. Then Teddy seemed to remember his last stretch in the penitentiary. He carefully set the chair down and walked out of the bar. But Teddy didn't feel like discussing his animosity towards Glenn with me. He said: "Sure, you know where the phone is."
        I called Glenn and asked him if he would lend me $2,000 dollars. He said he could only lend me a thousand. He was pretty pissed off. When he started criticizing me for being stupid enough to drive a good car on the back road, he sounded just like my stepfather, Leroy.
        I had about $800 dollars in the bank. The winter tourist season wasn't going to start for a while, and the police were cracking down on marijuana, plus there was a dry spell and marijuana was hard to come by for prices that made it profitable to sell. I was pretty worried, but I was sure everything would work out somehow. The owner of the body shop knew me because I'd brought a couple of taxis to him for repair. He'd give me credit. His estimate for the BMW was $3,000 dollars.
        I took another hit of Teddy's joint and sat down in front of his big color TV. He was watching hockey. Teddy ran the place kind of like a prison, with him being the toughest prisoner. Madman Russ was his lieutenant. Russ respected him. Even Motorcycle Mike paid his rent on time. Teddy used to be in the Hell's Angels and had done two terms in prison for murder. Now he was middle-aged and more laid back, but everybody, even Russ, was afraid of him. He had the best taxi on the island. Crazy Robbie used to wax it and wash it for him down at the dispatch office. Robbie would even wax the engine. Teddy hardly ever drove. Most of his money came from supplying taxi drivers with cocaine and marijuana to sell. Teddy had a cute, sweet, live-in girlfriend named Katherine, who was half his age. Katherine was pregnant, and Teddy was very proud. He started to take on a married look, bigger in the middle, graying at the temples, his curly black hair cut short and conservative. Katherine didn't do much of anything, except watch TV with Teddy and smoke bud joints. She and Jeannie, with pregnancy as their common interest, became friends. Before Jeannie had gone to jail, they liked to smoke pakalolo together and go shopping for maternity and baby clothes.
        It was a very hot afternoon, and Teddy wasn't wearing a shirt. I noticed that he was starting to grow breasts. This wasn't that unusual on Maui. The marijuana was so good and smoked so frequently that it seemed to affect the hormone balance of even the most macho of men. I read in Time magazine that it decreased testosterone. Judd, a hairy ex-con who drove Glenn's taxi from time to time, also had a pretty nice set of breasts, bigger than Jeannie's.
        Teddy was a good story teller. I was most interested in his prison stories, but when I questioned him, I felt like I was walking a tightrope. He seemed like he could snap at any moment. He invited me to sit on the stairs outside his front door so we wouldn't wake up Katherine, who was taking a nap. I asked him what prison was like. How did it feel to be there?
        "When I was 19 I got in a fist fight with my boss because he burned me for five dollars, and he ended up dying, and I went to the penitentiary in Arkansas. The guards there were fucking morons and sadistic motherfuckers. The police used to bring in the dead bodies of drunks they'd find on skid row and the guards'd put us in work details assigned to bury them. The only problem was that some of them weren't all-the-way dead. I was burying this guy, and he actually lifted his arm up through the dirt and was struggling to get out, and I called one of the guards over and said, 'Hey, this guy's not dead.' The guard said, 'Bury him anyway or I'll bury you.' I said, 'No fucking way, man, this guy's alive!' The guard hit me very hard with his shotgun and I fell into the hole. He said to the other prisoners on the detail: 'Bury the faggot.' And the other prisoners started throwing dirt on top of me. I decided to stay in there for a while and scare them, but they kept shoveling and I got scared. I'm right above this drunk guy that's still alive and I can feel him moving, so I jump up and throw the dirt off me and start digging with my hands where I think his face is. The next thing I knew, the guard hit me in the head with a shovel."
        The marijuana I'd shared with Teddy made me hyper-sensitive and emotional. His story was sadder than the Dostoyevsky book I was reading. Tears were pouring from my eyes, and I wasn't trying to hide them. I could feel Teddy's anguish, even though what he was telling me about happened long ago in a prison thousands of miles away. I didn't need to ask him more questions; my eyes were speaking to him: I was incredibly interested and hungry for what he had to tell me about his weird experiences of humans relating to humans.
        "I woke up in solitary confinement," he continued. "I was always in and out of solitary confinement, but this time it was really a bummer. Usually, I'd put tobacco and rolling papers and a couple of matches in a balloon and stick it up my ass, but this time I wasn't prepared. Also, I think I had a concussion, because I kept throwing up a lot. Anyway, while I was in there, they only fed me bread and water, and I never saw any light, so I didn't know if it was day or night. But I started doing a kind of yoga. I didn't even know what yoga was, then, but that's what I was doing. I got real limber; I could turn myself into a pretzel.
        "After I got back to my regular cell, I started practicing. I'm a good escaper, and now that I knew this yoga, I was very flexible. There was a grate in the laundry room that the guards thought no human could fit through, so nobody worried about it, but I knew the grate went out into the yard. A friend greased me up with pig fat, and I used a knife and took the grating off and squeezed into the hole. It was almost impossible, but I was so skinny from being in solitary and so flexible that I was able to bend my shoulders enough to get through. I hid behind a storage shed until about four in the morning and then ran across the yard when the tower guard was sleeping, and I dug under the fence with a pancake turner. I escaped and dyed my prison shirt in a creek with some food coloring from the cafeteria, and I walked into Little Rock and got a job at a car wash that same morning. I was free for about a week before some cop came into the car wash in his private car and recognized me. He busted me right there, and then I went back to the pen, this time in a high-security area that I couldn't figure out a way to escape from."
        Teddy went on to tell me how two guards tortured him to find out the name of another escapee. After beating him and kicking him until he was bloody and semi-conscious, they clipped electrical wires to his testicles and cranked one of those old telephones to generate voltage.
        Teddy felt good telling me that story. He wasn't allowed to cry, but it that he appreciated me crying for him. I was surprised, then, that he told me, after sharing a beer with me, that I had to move out of Freddy and Dorrita's place because they wanted it back. "Remember, I told you it was just temporary, Jerry."
        "Yeah. I remember. Do you have any other places?"
        "Only The Closet."
        "How much is it?"
        "Fifty."
        "I'll take it."
        It only took me about 15 minutes to move. All I owned was a good guitar, a large backpack, an old typewriter, and one box of junk from my life on the mainland.
        A couple of days later I took a tourist bus to Kahului and picked up Margie's BMW. It looked almost as good as new. I drove it out to Jeannie's place, parked it, and pushed the keys under the door. I wasn't in the mood to deal with Margie.
        Now I was totally broke, in debt, and living in Third World conditions. I was living right next to the communal kitchen. But it wasn't really communal because handsome Sam and his lovely wife Karen lived across from it, and they dominated it. Sam lived in the same termite-infested shack as the rest of us low-life cabbies, but he acted as if he were above us. He was a big coke dealer and he liked the anonymity that came from living in the old plantation house, where people came and went without last names and often without histories. Sam was funny because he talked like a Chicago gangster from the movies, even though he'd grown up in Newport Beach, California. The old wooden walls of the rooms inside the plantation shack were about a half-inch thick, and I could hear every coke deal and every time Sam and Karen had sex.
        My apartment was the size of a closet, hence its name. My bed was accessible by a ladder. The wooden floor had holes in it, which I had to step around. I used a shaky TV dinner table for my desk, and I had to watch it while I was typing so that one of the legs wouldn't fall into a hole. I had no running water or refrigerator. I bought a styrofoam ice chest to protect my food from insects, but the big, flying Maui roaches burrowed tunnels right through the styrofoam while I was sleeping. They broke through the plastic wrapper of a loaf of bread and made tunnels through the whole loaf. I began hanging my food and my toothbrush from the ceiling by strings.
        Every night when I'd come home from driving taxi, I'd find roaches everywhere. I furiously removed my sandals to bludgeon them. Coming home to my welcoming committee of teeming vermin was extremely depressing. I ate out a lot, which was a drain on my income and health.
        I got a chronic sore throat and spent a lot of time hitchhiking back and forth to Kahului to get a welfare medical card and have tests done. It turned out I was OK. After having every test that several doctors could think of, a tough female doctor looked at me and said, "There's nothing wrong with you. You're just depressed. You need counseling."
        She set up a counseling appointment for me the next weekend at a church in Lahaina. My counselor turned out to be a little old lady. I told her the story of my life on Maui, and she didn't have much to say about it. She asked me if I wanted to see her next week, and I said, "I'll think about it." I walked out of there feeling better. Just putting all the chaos I'd been through lately into organized sentences helped. I felt a sense of resolve that I was going to do something.
        I spent the next day lying on my uncomfortable bed, surrounded by four dirty wooden walls, ancient green paint cracking off them. The fourth wall had a little screen door with a curtain over it for privacy. Gecko lizards hunted on the wooden beams of the old ceiling, chirping like birds when they scored a mosquito. I saw a glowing, fluorescent blue centipede about eight inches long, the kind that had put Jim in the hospital for two days, go down one wall and into a hole in my floor. A filthy black electric fan swept noisily back and forth, blowing hot air over my sweaty body. I could hear Sam and Karen screaming at one of their coke customers. I heard Sam cock an automatic pistol, and I curled up in the fetal position. A bullet would go through Sam's wall and my walls as if they were paper. Introducing a gun into the conflict helped bolster Sam's gangster self-image and made him happy and more magnanimous. He told his customer he'd let him slide for another week. I fell into an uneasy sleep. I awoke hearing Russ yelling at his fat, homely wife, telling her that she'd been unfaithful. I heard him put the bolt into his hunting rifle. I didn't have to resume the fetal position because I was already in it. I just lay there and thought about my life on lovely Maui.
        I could hear Motorcycle Mike's stereo from up in his tree house. He was playing the Doors; Jim Morrison sang with life-and-death intensity: "Day destroys the night / Night divides the day. / Try to run, try to hide / Break on through to the other side . . ."
        That's it! I thought. It's so fucking obvious. I've got to break through, no matter what the cost. The world is doomed if there isn't some kind of major breakthrough in consciousness.
        I decided to fast for 30 days atop 10,000-foot-high Mount Haleakala, overlooking the moon-like volcanic crater on East Maui. 40 days was for Jesus, and it seemed too long. I wanted to break through, not die. I figured that there were a lot of old people alive who had lived through Hitler's concentration camps; certainly if I had enough water to drink, I could survive for 30 days.
        I felt like telling somebody about my great plan. Nobody at Kobo's would understand, so I walked over to tell Marilyn and the old Hungarian man. The Hungarian man pretended to be highly psychic about my mission; he knew I was naive enough to buy his act.
        "Jerry, you can find what you seek in only four days," he said, in his oracle voice. "It's not necessary for you to stay for 30 days."
        Lazy by nature, I was kind of relieved that I could save the world in a mere four days. Marilyn and I walked to Burger King to celebrate with one of their fake ice cream sundaes.
        "Are you a prophet, Jerry?" she asked.
        "Yes," I answered. I actually said "Yes."
        Marilyn wasn't even surprised. There were a lot of guys who thought they were prophets on Maui in those days. We walked for a long time and she listened to me pontificate about the state of the world. Reagan's nuclear "Peacekeeper" missiles, global warming, pollution, the death of John Lennon, and the greatness of Rajneesh.
        We kissed goodbye. She would leave for Canada before I returned from the wilderness.
        I went home and loaded up my backpack with three plastic gallon bottles of distilled water and one little box of raisins in case I ran out of strength and was unable to hike back down the mountain after my fast. I called up my local friend, Kevin, and asked him to meet me at the Pioneer Inn. Over beers, I told him about my plan. He thought I was nuts.
        "It's winter, bra. You'll freeze to death up there. Every winter they carry down dead haoles who froze to death in their sleeping bags."
        "I feel like it's God's will for me to go up there, Kevin. I think God was talking to me when I heard that Doors song, and everything will be all right."
        "Well I think you're crazy. But if you go up there, take two sleeping bags and a tent, or I'm telling you, you will freeze to death."
        Early the next morning, I set off carrying my overloaded backpack to the highway. I had borrowed a tent and an extra sleeping bag from my affluent coke dealer neighbors, Sam and Karen. I got a ride to Kahului pretty quickly, but after that there was little traffic on the highway. I put my large backpack on and walked for a couple of miles, just thinking. I'd never fasted before. I wondered what it would feel like. I purposely didn't bring anything to distract me from my spiritual mission—no pencil, no paper, no harmonica, nothing but what I thought I'd need to survive.
        My shoulders were aching. There was no way I'd be able to make it to the summit carrying so much weight, so I jettisoned two of my three bottles of water. Now, I realized, I had a new problem: not enough water to last for four days of fasting, especially after the arduous hike to the summit.
        A nice haole guy picked me up in a new Toyota. We began talking, and he tried to sell me his company's new home-water-distilling system. I said I was interested, and he gave me his card. I told him I was going to the mountaintop to fast for four days and that I wished I had more water. He said just a second and stopped the car. He got out, opened the trunk, and took out a gallon of distilled water bottled by his company. I hooked a bungee cord around the handle of the plastic bottle and secured it to my pack and thanked him. I thought the fact that I'd gotten picked up by someone with distilled water and dropped right at the trail head to the top of Haleakala was a definite sign from God.
        I hiked for about five miles singing "Om Namah Shivaya," Sanskrit for "I bow to the Godhead/to myself." I hadn't had anything to eat, and I was starving. When I reached the summit, I was alone. There were often tourists up there, but the tourist season hadn't quite started yet, and all was peaceful and surreal. The red volcanic land stretched out below in an eerie otherworldly scene. The crater was far below me. I could see some backpackers, like little dots, traversing it.
        I set up my tent, took out my sleeping bags and my miniature camp stove, and lay down to take a nap. When I woke up, I was still hungry, so I decided to meditate. I did several yoga sun-salute exercises and then I used one of the sleeping bags still in its cover for a meditation cushion. After meditating, I felt in control of my hunger. Then I noticed some dark clouds approaching my tent.
        I didn't know anything about Maui weather at 10,000 feet, but I supposed that if the clouds reached me, I might freeze. They moved towards me, and then retreated. I felt God was protecting me while I did God's work; I almost felt I could stop the clouds with my mind.
        The sunset was awesome; it was the first sunset I'd ever seen from the rocky peaks of the crater-marked planet Maui.
        That night was freezing. I put on all my clothes and a heavy jacket, zipped myself into two sleeping bags, and zipped the tent closed. I was still shivering. I opened a place for the fumes to get out and lit my little camp stove. I could only burn it for a short time or I wouldn't have fuel to last me the whole four days.
        I managed to get through the first night without too much discomfort. But the next morning the clouds came again. And this time God didn't care if I froze to death or not. The clouds covered my tent, and I began freezing to death in earnest. The problem was that both of the sleeping bags I had were really cheap and old. The little two-man tent was one of those K-mart specials that you can buy for ten dollars.
        Lack of food was making it worse. I propped myself up in my sleeping bags and prayed to God. I made myself perfectly still and followed my breathing, and my body stopped shaking so badly. After a few moments, the clouds went away and the sun made my tent hot and stuffy. I was back in shorts and T-shirt in moments.
        I walked around my campsite and admired the awesome scenery. There were still no tourists about, so I took off my clothes and lay down between two big rocks to shield my body from the wind. When the wind died down, I walked around and explored my campsite. I was the first man. The sky was clear and the sun was beating down. The sea was royal blue in the distance. I sat on a rock and began singing a reggae song I'd heard often on Jim's stereo at Kobotaki's. At the top of my lungs, I sang:
        We had gold, we had silver, we had cultural things,
        Be-fore there was slavery, there were black queens and kings.
        Our black civilization will rise to the foe.
        Our black civilization will rise to the foe!
        I was really getting into this song when suddenly two fat Australian tourists, a man and wife, seemed to come out of nowhere. They walked along the trail right up to where I was singing. I stopped and said, "How's it going?" I was beyond being embarrassed, a naked white boy from the suburbs singing about black liberation.
        "Fine. It's really beautiful up here," the man said.
        "Yeah, it sure is," I answered.
        They set up their tent in a campsite right next to mine. I was pissed off, but I realized that God must have had some good reason for sending them to me. The reason soon became apparent: I was going to freeze tonight without their white gas for my camp stove. The dark clouds approached again, and the wind came up. I put my clothes on and went to borrow the fuel. We ended up talking in their tent almost until sunrise. I went back to my tent and slept for a while. I dreamed of food, of eating mahi-mahi at the Ocean House restaurant in Lahaina, and drinking good wine. I woke up a couple of hours later and watched a magnificent sunrise. My hunger was gone, and I felt clean and pure. I cried before the beauty and majesty of nature as the clouds turned fiery red and lavender and rays of sun spread through the sky like in the pictures in my childhood Bible.
        For the next two days and nights, the weather was fine. I was alone again—the Australians had packed up and hiked down to their car. I meditated, walked, and sang religious chants. I forgot all about my little package of raisins. I thanked God and felt bliss. I felt I had truly broken through to enlightenment. I drank a cup of hot water and prayed for world peace.
        On the fourth day, I packed up my tent and began the hike down to the highway. I no longer felt hungry, but my strength was gone. Still, I didn't eat the raisins. I chanted "Om Namah Shivaya" whenever I thought I couldn't go on, and I finally made it down to the highway. Immediately I got a ride from some young tourists headed for Hana. They only wanted to know where they could get marijuana. I told them I couldn't help them today, but, "Have you ever tried meditating?" I might as well start saving the world now as any time, I thought, as I rode in the back of their rented Jeep. They let me off on the highway near the house of one of Uncle Glenn's old girlfriends.
        Allison knew me pretty well, but she hadn't seen me for months, not since she'd moved to the other side of the island. She had no idea that I had been in the mountains or that I was going to drop in on her. But prophets don't need an invitation. In my mind, she was lucky to have me. All I owed her was enlightenment. I was so tired that I slept in my clothes on the wooden floor of her small living room without a sleeping bag. I dreamed of Jesus and Buddha with boxing gloves on, fighting.
        When I woke up the next morning, I looked at the clock on the wall of her kitchen and realized that it had been exactly four days since I'd eaten, so I asked her if she had anything to eat. I still felt clean and pure and incredibly tuned in to my body. All she had were some Maui potato chips, good coffee, and cigarettes. She said she was on the way to the store. I ate the whole bag of potato chips in a matter of minutes and washed them down with rich Kona coffee. Then I bummed a cigarette from her. Now I was beginning to feel like my old self again. I was still starving, so I asked her if I could go to the store with her. She was glad to have me accompany her because she wanted to get rid of me. Just as we were ready to leave her house, she said, "I'm expecting company, and I'm sorry but I really can't invite you to stay."
        "That's OK," I said, as I went for my backpack in the corner of her kitchen. I was practicing equanimity, one of Rajneesh's main teachings. I actually wanted to stay very badly because I remembered she was a great cook. Everything looked delicious at the little market. I bought a health food sandwich—tofu and alfalfa sprouts on whole-wheat bread—a quart of carrot juice, and a big greasy donut. I waved goodbye to Allison as she drove back towards her little house, and I sat down in front of the store to enjoy my feast.
        I was very tired and sick from the food and another cigarette I'd bummed from Allison, but I had to get on the road so I could make it home before it got dark. I was afraid of being picked up by locals in the night.
        A Volkswagen van full of Maui hippies picked me up, and we drove along the winding jungle roads until we got to Makenna Beach. There, we sat on a seawall and passed around a bag of psychedelic mushrooms. I was beginning to feel famished again, not so much for food but for the idea of food, the act of chewing something solid. Our conversation was animated, and each time the plastic bag of mushrooms came around to me, I forgot they were a psychedelic drug, and I ate them as hors d'oeuvres, as food. Suddenly it dawned on me that I had eaten enough psychedelic mushrooms to make 20 hippies very high. I walked around. I was walking on mountain ranges, stepping over oceans. I could hold planets in my hand. Then I stepped off the sea wall and fell 10 feet to the shiny black rocks below. I fell in slow motion, and the rocks I landed on were made of chocolate pudding.
        I was totally unhurt. The hippies came and retrieved me and drove me home in their rented van. I stuck my head out the window and threw up all over the side of their van, but they were cool about it. They were glad to be rid of me when we got near Lahaina, though. They were staying at a campsite in Olowalu, so they didn't take me all the way into town.
        Around Lahaina, I'd actually become kind of famous. The marijuana-smoking crowd had an altered sense of time and didn't know if I'd been away in the mountains for 30 days or three minutes. The next car that picked me up was driven by a young waiter. I told him I'd been camping on Haleakala, and he said, "Aren't you the guy who fasted on Haleakala for 30 days?" I answered dejectedly, "It was more like three days, and then I fell off a seawall." "Far out."
        I returned to my Closet and thought about what my next move should be. I was out of work, my plans to travel to Thailand and see my stepfather were dashed, and I felt not only depression, but terror. On my first night back, Teddy threw somebody through the plate glass window of his two-story flat in the plantation shack, and the body thudded on the ground right in front of me as I walked up the path to the part of the shack that contained The Closet. A dark form got up off the ground and limped away.
        I decided I had to leave the island.
        My guitar was an excellent hand-made Spanish classical model that I knew Kevin liked a lot. The next morning I sold it to him for $300 dollars. I sold a gold necklace I'd bought from Marilyn at the Hyatt gift shop to Teddy for another hundred. I paid the guy at the body shop as much as I could, saving just enough for a plane ticket and some pakalolo to sell on the mainland to get up enough money for an apartment and a car. I was getting out of here. I was going back to L.A. where it was safe.
        I got a cheap one-way ticket through a travel agent friend in Lahaina and bought a big box of bud leaf, almost useless on Maui but a desirable, strong drug on the mainland, from Madman Russ. I walked to Nagasako's market and bought some ground coffee and some plastic trash bags. On the way home, I walked through the old Whaler's Graveyard and found a piece of broken gravestone.
        Apparently, the police dogs they had at the airports and post offices couldn't smell marijuana if it was packed in coffee. When I got back to Kobo's, I dumped the marijuana into a plastic bag and sealed it tightly with a little twist wire. I put some coffee into another plastic bag. Then I put the bag containing the marijuana into the bag containing the coffee and sealed the coffee bag. I put this bag into another bag of coffee, and so on, until I had four layers of coffee around the marijuana. I wrapped this package in a blanket and placed it all into a strong cardboard box to which I added the piece of a gravestone for weight. A light box from Maui was almost certainly marijuana, and if a mailman ripped me off, there'd be nobody I could report it to. Finally, I added an anonymous note to my brother in L.A., saying that this marijuana was a gift from some grateful person who he had done a good turn for in Hawaii last year, something like, "If you hadn't helped me get my car started, we would have missed our plane and our whole vacation would have been ruined." Since it was a felony to send pakalolo in the mail, I didn't want my brother to get busted if the cops came into his house while he was opening it. I taped the seams of the box carefully and addressed it to my brother. I used a false return address.
        I caught a taxi just leaving from Kobotaki's and went into Lahaina to mail my package. There was a long line of tourists in the post office, and it was very hot and stuffy in there. Several people were mailing big coconuts with the hulls still on them, the addresses of their friends and relatives written right on the green hulls . I stood holding my large box and wondering what was that strange sweet fragrance I was smelling. I'd never smelled anything like it. Suddenly I realized that the aromas of the fresh-roasted Kona coffee and the marijuana were mingling into a pungent odor that was filling the whole post office. The nice old postal clerk, Leilani, was looking at me. She knew me and my uncle by name. She was old but she was sharp, and I started to wonder if I could get away with this. I'd heard that local guys inside of prison were pretty hard on haoles. I noticed Crazy Robbie standing in a second line right beside me. "Hey, Robbie, howzit?" I said.
        He turned around, happy to see me, and said "Howzit Jerry. Whatcha got in that box? Marijuana?" He had no idea that there was really pot in the box. A few people turned and stared at me and my smelly box. I was sweating and trying to look normal. "No, it's just some clothes and Kona coffee for my brother's family," I said. It was my turn to go to the counter. Kindly, grandmotherly Leilani looked at my box and didn't comment on the sweet, sickening, extremely unusual smell emanating from it. "How's your uncle, Jerry?" she asked. "Oh, he's just fine. Still driving taxi and going out with tourist girls." She placed postage on the box, stamped it, threw it in a bin, and took my money. "Bye bye, Leilani," I said, knowing that she might just be playing it cool until I left the post office.
        When I got home, I got a message from Teddy that Jeannie had called and that she was being released from prison in Honolulu to have her baby on Maui. Jeannie wanted me to be there for the birth. I called the airline and canceled my flight indefinitely.
        I caught a blue-and-white bus to Jeannie's and welcomed her back. Margie kind of scowled at me. Later I found out that the doors didn't line up right on her car and that the new paint didn't quite match the old. She didn't want to ruin Jeannie's homecoming by talking about it, though. The TV was on as always, and the dinner was great. Jeannie seemed subdued and sad, not her old happy and positive self. She said she was going to be allowed to stay out of prison on probation. I was bored hanging out at Jeannie's house for the next few days, but I was just about broke, and her rich mom was paying for the groceries, so I didn't complain. Jeannie found our old Lamaze notebook, and we practiced her breathing and me timing her contractions.
        Jeannie woke me up at two in the morning. She was having labor pains. Her mother drove as Jeannie sat in the front passenger seat tilted all the way back. I sat in the back seat timing her contractions and her pulse and reminding her to breathe deeply.
        The birth was the first I'd ever witnessed. It seemed to be going fairly well and quickly, but when the baby's head came out, the doctor was visibly shocked. The baby had a large tumor on its head, the size of a tennis ball. Jeannie was cool, but she was afraid that I would faint. After the baby was born, she told me to go into the waiting room and tell her mother that it was a healthy boy and that everything was fine. I did so, asked for a cigarette and the keys to the BMW, and drove around Wailuku, thinking. Like all humans, I wondered if God punished people randomly or on purpose.
        After I was sufficiently relaxed, I returned to the hospital to find out what was happening. The doctors had X-rayed the baby's head and found that, luckily, the tumor was separated from the brain by the skull. The baby would be OK. They said not to worry; the tumor would gradually diminish in size and disappear by the time the baby was five.
        Jeannie was allowed to bring the baby home, and I played father for a couple of days. She was so proud of her baby. Her old strength and indomitable spirit were returning. She named him Sean Gerald (after me) Hewitt.
        Margie was worried about the big, ugly, veiny tumor. She had me take a picture of it with her good Polaroid camera, and she mailed it to Children's Hospital in Seattle.
        Jeannie was sad that I was leaving Maui, but she accepted it. Everybody was always leaving Maui. You get "rock fever" after living there for a while. She kept it a secret that Teddy was having a big going-away party for me.
        Jim Black was there, his blonde hair in dreadlocks like a Rastafarian. Crazy Robbie, Motorcycle Mike, Russ, Big John, Uncle Glenn, the passionate lovers Freddy and Dorrita, even Sam the gangster and Karen. I played Teddy's guitar for everybody and sang a funny song I'd written about Freddy and Dorrita. Cocaine and pakalolo were abundant, as well as Primo beer. Jeannie was there, and she had tears in her eyes as she watched me playing and singing. Kevin, my local friend, was there with his new girlfriend, Mavis, the hostess from the Hyatt. No wonder he hadn't wanted me to go out with her. It was a good party, and I felt very touched and sad to be leaving Maui.
        I started to have second thoughts about leaving, so I delayed making new flight reservations. I knew I'd leave soon, but in the meantime I picked up a few shifts in various taxis just to make enough money to live, and I enjoyed the beautiful white beaches and the refreshing water. But a few things happened that renewed my determination to leave.
        Jim Black, my so-called guru, who lived in the Cave at Kobotaki's, surprised me by inviting me flying. I didn't even know he had a flying license. He had rented a plane to take a sexy blond tourist girl flying for her 18th birthday. When I saw the clear pill container with six neatly-rolled joints in it that he was planning to bring aloft with them, I declined the invitation. The plane Jim rented stalled when he was doing aerobatics above the coast of Kihei, and he crashed into the sea. When divers found the plane about 100 feet below the surface, Jim and the woman were still strapped into their seats. They looked perfectly OK, the woman's long blonde hair flowing in slow motion in the ocean current that moved through the broken windshield of the plane.
        Within that same week, Motorcycle Mike blew his brains out with his .45 automatic.
        Teddy's girlfriend's baby was born with an extra thumb.
        And then Jeannie had to leave for Seattle immediately. Jeannie called me on Teddy's phone and told me that when doctors at Children's Hospital saw the picture I'd taken of the baby's deformity, they had told her to get the baby on a plane for Seattle immediately so they could operate. They said that without an operation, the baby would die within a few weeks. The large veins inside the tumor were making his heart work too hard.
        Yes, it was definitely time for me to go. Uncle Glenn had just been punched in a random attack by a local in a bar. The Boeing Hydrofoil Seaflight boats were grinding up dolphins daily. My friends were dying or leaving the island. And a Japanese corporation was building a 12-story condominium on the exact spot on Makena Beach where I had juggled the spheres of the universe on my mushroom trip. I got my things together and special requested 8-Ball, Glenn's taxi.
        Uncle Glenn, accompanied by two tourist girls who looked like models, drove me to the airport and kissed me goodbye. I cried when I we parted. He was a good uncle.
        Somebody flagged him down at the airport, so he took off with a fare in his car and didn't see me to my plane. I took a small jet to the Honolulu airport on Oahu and waited around in a bar where they were playing "We're going to a hukilau."
        When it was almost time for me to board my plane, I walked through the long corridors past gate after gate at Honolulu's international airport. I was a little early for boarding, so I stood around and watched people, wondering what their stories were. Somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and looked up at Lucretia. She was wearing regular Levi's and a blouse, but they were both dyed a strange, rich purple color.
        I was leaving for L.A. in 15 minutes from Gate 25, and she was leaving for Oregon in 20 minutes from Gate 21. I didn't see Nathan around, so I hugged her tightly. "Lucretia, I love you," I said. She had a kind of detached look in her eyes, and she answered, "I love you too, Jerry." It was obvious that her love was the kind of love one has for mankind, or God, a general kind of love, not romantic.
        "Where are you going?" I asked.
        "I'm going to Oregon; I'm going to stay with some beautiful people who love me."
        "What about Nathan?"
        "He doesn't know I'm leaving. He thinks I'm at his aunt's house helping her cook for his father's birthday party. How about you? Where are you going?"
        "I'm going to L.A. to stay with my brother. I can't take it here anymore. Too many strange things keep happening. And I'm lonely here; I really don't belong."
        "Everybody belongs, Jerry. We're all God; we're all the same being looking at itself from different angles."
        She was starting to sound like me, and it sounded silly, even to me. I wasn't sure if she was making fun of me or not. I was so attracted to her, though, that I would have done anything for her. On an impulse, I unzipped a pocket of my backpack and got out a solid-gold cross my grandmother had given me. It was over a hundred years old. "Here, Lucretia. I want you to have this. And I want to see you again someday. After you get settled in Oregon, call me up. Here's my brother's number," I said, as I wrote it on a page from my little notebook and wrapped the cross with it. "Good luck, Lucretia."
        "Nahmaste," said Lucretia, some kind of Hindi salutation. She was definitely acting strangely.
        Once my plane reached cruising altitude, I sat cross-legged as best I could in a coach-class seat and meditated. At 30,000 feet off the ground, I accidentally found my way out to the maze that Jim Black had spoken of. I completely merged with the Godhead and knew all. What I knew was that all of reality was in my own mind; it was like a thick dream that only seemed substantial; the whole universe was merely a movie that I was projecting for myself to live in.
        As my legs started falling asleep and a seatbelt buckle distracted me by digging into my thigh, the responsibility of being God and holding the whole universe together suddenly became too much. I was afraid my mind couldn't even hold the plane I was riding in together. I started to transform back into my miserable, skinny, hippy self again, yet I still had the awesome responsibility of holding the universe together. Suddenly, I saw the huge jetliner break up midair. People, luggage, and seats tumbled towards earth. I was belted into my seat as I plummeted through the lovely blue sky and soft white clouds. I forced myself out of God consciousness and back into being a regular person just in time for the plane to make a normal landing.
        My brother Tim and his wife met me at the airport in L.A. They started preaching to me before I even got my backpack from the luggage carousel. They had recently become born-again Christians.
        Tim said, "Jerry, you can't believe the difference in your life once you find Jesus. It's so great, that there's no way to describe it. I'd be happy if you were hit by a truck and paralyzed for life, if that led you to becoming a Christian; that's how great Christianity is."
        Madye chimed in, "Do you know how long eternity is? Can you imagine being tortured for eternity just because you couldn't accept the gift of God's own Son, who sacrificed his life so that you could live in heaven forever?"
        I said, "I already believe in God, but I get closer to God from meditation than from studying the Bible. Don't you realize that there are many bibles on this planet? You're just coming from the culture that emphasized this particular Bible. Hinduism has heaven and hell, and even a god, Krishna, who came to earth in the form of a man and did miracles for holy purpose—"
        "Meditation is of the devil," said Madye. "A still mind is the devil's playground. And all those other religions are false. Does any other religion have a Messiah who was able to rise again three days after his death?"
        "Well, actually, yes . . ." But she didn't want to hear it. Tim was glad to see me even if I was a heathen.
        When we got to their apartment, Tim showed me the box that I'd sent from Maui. It had arrived a week ago. "What's in it, Jerry?"
        "Pakalolo."
        "What's pakalolo?"
        "Da kine."
        "Come on, what's in the box?"
        "Marijuana, my brother."
        Madye scowled. "I'm sorry, Jerry," she said, "but we can't have that box in this house. Marijuana is of the devil."
        "Then why did God create it?" I asked, but her mind was made up. Tim compromised and said I could keep the box there for one more day until I made other arrangements.
        After they went to sleep, I found a couple of baggies and weighed out a couple of ounces on Madye's kitchen scale. I walked out to a busy cross street and waited for a taxi with a young driver in it to come by. Finally one came and I flagged it down. I showed the driver my marijuana and sold it to him for a ridiculously-low price. He drove me to my brother's house, where I picked up my box of weed and my backpack. He took me to a cheap motel. I used the money he'd paid me for the dope to pay the driver and for the room.
        The next day I called up everybody I knew and sold all of the dope. My prices were so good that nobody could refuse; they could break up the fat ounces I was selling them and sell quarter ounces for what they were paying for the whole ounce. That evening, I bought a '63 Rambler station wagon that I found in the classified section of the paper. It had a three-on-the-tree manual transmission and overdrive.
        Now that the pot was gone, I could move back in with Tim and Madye. They preached to me in stereo, standing on either side of me every evening as I washed the dinner dishes. I felt very weary.
        I'd gotten a job at a big department store loading and unloading trucks. The loading dock was under a massive building, and I felt buried alive after the clean and natural beauty of Maui and the freedom of being a cab driver. I remembered how I'd park my taxi and jump in the ocean any time I got too hot.
        The freeways were a nightmare. I had forgotten how ugly parts of L.A. were. It seemed inconceivable to me that humans would willingly live in such ugliness. The air was filthy, and the background noise after about six in the morning filled my mind so that it was hard to think.
        On my days off, I walked around like a freak, wearing big, loose drawstring pants and faded Aloha shirts. My hair was long and light from the sun, and my skin was tanned brown. The transmission on my Rambler died, so now I was working just to pay my brother back for the repair bill. I started riding the bus to work so I'd have more time to read. I read a 2000-page biography of Hitler.
        One night, Tim told me there was a woman on the phone who wanted to speak to me.
        It was Lucretia. "Jerry, how are you?" I was dumbfounded. I stammered that I was fine and that I missed her. "Come and visit me. Here's my address," she said, sweeter and more humble than the Lucretia I remembered.
        I told her I would see her after I got my finances in order.
        In a few weeks, I'd paid my brother back and had a couple hundred dollars left. I said goodbye and thanks to Tim and Madye and took off for Oregon. Now my Rambler was only running on five cylinders, but I made it all the way to the little town where she said she lived.
        A gas station attendant had an odd look on his face when I asked him how to get to the address Lucretia had given me. He looked at me like I was some kind of criminal. His directions led me out into the country, and I was starting to think he'd purposely sent me on a wild goose chase, when I saw a road sign that said "Brahma Road," the street Lucretia had told me to look for. Hindu street names in Oregon? This must be it. I noticed a pickup truck going the other way. The man and woman in it were wearing purple clothes. I turned into what seemed to be a large ranch and was stopped by two men at a guard shack. They both wore purple clothes. They asked me if I had any sound-recording equipment or cameras. They searched me for weapons and did a thorough search of my car. "Nahmaste," they said, and pointed me in the direction of Lucretia's house. I pulled in front of an old two-story house and parked. When I got out, I heard a hissing sound and watched one of my tires go flat right before my eyes. Well, at least my car got me here.
        As I approached the house, I realized that there must be a big party going on. It sounded crazy in there. I knocked, but nobody answered, so I opened the old front door and entered. Everywhere were attractive young people in purple Levi's, purple shirts, purple dresses, and purple robes. Some were dancing, some were playing musical instruments. One guy was sitting alone in the kitchen eating a whole chocolate cake. A young man with a pale complexion was sitting on a sofa next to a large ashtray, smoking cigarettes. I watched him light a new one from the butt of the last.
        Every time somebody noticed me, they would say "Nahmaste" and hug me as if I was their dearest friend and then go about their business. There were many rooms in this house, and something was going on in all of them. In one room with its door ajar, I saw two women making love, in another two men and three women in the same bed. In another room, a naked young man was being Rolfed—having a deep massage from a Rolfer who was pushing her hands so deeply into his muscle tissue that I guessed his body would turn black and blue. Everybody here seemed to be involved in questionable behavior. I didn't see Lucretia anywhere. She wasn't expecting me on any certain day—I'd wanted to surprise her.
        In another room, a young man was meditating and screaming at the top of his lungs while another young man rubbed his finger in tiny circles around and around the screaming man's "third eye" in the center of his forehead. I walked down some stairs to a large basement. There were at least 50 purple-clad people wearing pink blindfolds, dancing to loud electric sitar and synthesizer music pumped through powerful stereo speakers. They were dancing with total abandon since nobody could see them, they thought, and since they couldn't even see themselves. It was very freaky. They danced frenetically, intensely, insanely, a primal movement of beautiful rich kids going crazy. By now, I'd seen about 20 worshipful oil paintings and posters of Rajneesh on the walls. I knew where I was. This house was part of the massive Rajneesh commune. I guess Lucretia had read the Rajneesh book I'd recommended to her after all.
        I continued to watch the dancers leaping, bumping into walls and into one another, spinning, reaching, writhing, shaking spasmodically. Abruptly, the recorded electronic music came to a halt, and everyone immediately lay down on the floor in the yoga "corpse position." Apparently, the point of going from frenetic motion to stillness was to release suppressed feelings. Many of the dancers sobbed uncontrollably, while others did their lying-down meditation in silence. I could hear the hissing of the blank part of the tape playing through the speakers. After a few minutes, Rajneesh's nasal voice came through the speakers. It was a lecture about religion in the world. As he built up to his main point, his voice sounded as if he were about to cry. "Organized religion is a pathology of the human race."
        I walked back up the stairs and through the weird hallways, searching for an exit. I sneaked out into the night through a kitchen door and followed a cement walkway around the back of the house. While peeing behind some trees, I was suddenly blinded by a spotlight. Two of Rajneesh's perimeter guards jumped out of the bushes and ordered me to lie face down on the cement. One of them had an Uzi machine gun. They searched me carefully, looking for cameras, recording equipment, weapons, or maybe perfume, which Rajneesh was deathly allergic to. After searching me, they allowed me to go back to my car. I changed my flat tire in the dark and drove away.

Mellow Maui

Chapter II: Three Fathers